Study of the influence of the exhaust line ultrasounds over the performance of the Blind Spot Warning System

During the previous years, the vehicle manufacturers have tried to equip their vehicles with as much technology as possible, making the driving experience for people easier than ever. Most of the modern vehicles come today with ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) either for driving (E.g. Cruise Control, Blind Spot Warning) or Parking (E.g. Rear Ultrasonic Sensors, Rear View Camera). Since the vehicle come equipped with more technology, a major task in developing vehicle remains the integration of these ADAS system in the vehicle context with the other components. Since most of the components cope with each other on the vehicle level, some technologies are more affected by other components – such as the case of an ultrasound vehicle scanning system (Blind Spot Warning) and the Exhaust line that emits ultrasounds from the exhaust muffler. The aim of this paper is to study the influence of the exhaust line ultrasounds (ultrasounds that are emitted by the engine cycle and filtered in the exhaust line of the vehicle) over the detection performance of the Blind Spot Warning Ultrasound system. Since vehicles are sold with a wide variety of powertrains, the solution presented took into account also these differences between powertrains equipped. In order to test the solution, mock-ups of the vehicle were made in order to proof the robustness of the method.